Fluffy Horde

Review

Have you ever had an apparition of any sort while walking on the street looking up at the sky? Well, I had one recently, and it wasn’t glowing and didn’t have this warm and enchanting sound that makes you walk closer while extending your hands toward it! Nope, mine was totally different and rather weird. I saw a gigantic bunny with a staff in one of his paws, waving at me. Then, he started to talk with a deep voice and the next thing I saw was an incoming horde of bunnies hopping fast towards me. Apparently, this particular apparition is very common and if you see it, you ‘ll be in deep battle with the almighty Fluffy Horde.

Fluffy Horde is a combination of a 2D Side-scrolling defence tower and real-time strategy game developed and published by Turtle Juice and available on Steam.

The game offers 4 worlds to play through and each world contains 25 levels, including a boss fight. Most of the levels can be completed in under a minute, and each of them will have three specific tasks for you to complete; if you manage to do all of them, you’ll be rewarded with 4 golden medals at the end of the level. Most of these tasks are to beat a level within a nominated time frame; however, there are some variations, such as making sure the windmill or the princess was not damaged, or only use a certain number of soldiers or carrots for example. If either the windmill or the princess is part of one of the three tasks, the windmill can’t be destroyed, and the princess can’t die, otherwise it is game over.

Before starting a battle, you’ll be able to check the entire map of the level by pointing and clicking your mouse cursor on the gauge map, which is located at the bottom of your screen. That way, you can familiar yourself with where the bunnies are coming or dropping from, as well as where the windmill, barracks and farms are.  You’ll be able to see where the obstacles are, see the machines that can help you push back the horde, or where the princess needs to go to start her party (her friends are usually located on the other side of the map). The second gauge, which is just above the map gauge, is the one of the bunny’s population. You can’t miss it - there is a bunny’s head on it and you need to make sure that the head doesn’t reach the far right of that gauge or it will be game over too. So, when you’re ready, press on the battle button to start the stage!

In some levels, you might have a barracks where you can purchase archers or swordsmen, and occasionally you might have both. You’ll always start with a few coins but will need to get more money to purchase new units and upgrade them. If there are farms on that level, make sure to purchase a farmer by clicking above the structure to regenerate more coins. However, you’ll need to make sure to have units close by to protect them against the bunnies. There is another way to make money, but I’ll let you discover it for yourself.  If the map has a market, you can buy a unit that is cleverly disguised as a giant carrot and it will attract the bunnies towards it. These units die rather quickly when the bunnies hit them.  

I really like the humour in this game, especially the one-liners, and the voice-over is well done - it’s great fun! There are no difficulty settings, but if you are like me and want to try to collect all the medals per level, it will be quite a challenge to get them all, let me tell you.

Great pixel artworks, good soundtrack and it is easy to play with the mouse.  It would have been better if we had had different units, rather than only five in total.